"the world's most notorious rap group,"
which is indisputable, although it should
be noted that this title has been vacant for
some time-in hip-hop, notoriety hasn't
been in fashion since the early days of
Eminem. Odd Futurès willfully repug-
nant lyrics-the verses contain plenty of
violent sexual fantasies, and "faggot" is
frequently deployed as a term of ad-
dress-are designed to nettle cosmopol-
itan listeners who have come to think of
themselves as generally unnettlable, add-
ing an unmistakable element of cruelty to
music that can otherwise seem playful.
There is something profoundly nostalgic
about this strategy: Odd Future some-
times seems intent on resurrecting the
bad old days, when hip-hop was scary,
even if that means concocting sadistic
fantasies or reinforcing old prejudices.
The Odd Future charge has been led
by the group's founder and mastermind,
Tyler Okonma, known as Tyler, the
Creator. He is a twenty-year-old auteur,
rapper, designer, and musician (he cre-
ated the murky but propulsive beat for
"Earl"), who might be described as
"lively" -but oruy by someone prone to
understatement. The rise of Odd Future
has turned Tyler into a new-media celeb-
rity, a role he was born to play. After a
recent performance at the Coachella
festival, he wandered into the festival
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grounds and wasn't entirely unhappy
when well-wishers noticed him and gave
chase. On his @fucktyler Twitter ac-
count he wrote, "OMG Fucking Just
Ran From A Pack Of Fans Threw
Coachella. Shit Was Wild!"
The other members of the group
have become cult celebrities, too. Hodgy
Beats, a diminutive, quick-tempered
rapper, is the group's hip-hop tradition-
alist and also its self-proclaimed "vice-
president"; he is half of the duo Mellow-
Hype, along with an eccentric and
laconic producer who calls himself Left
Brain. Two more rappers, Domo Gen-
esis and Mike G, are known for unhur-
ried verses that both proclaim and evoke
their shared dedication to marijuana.
Matt Martians makes spaced-out funk
Travis Bennett, known as Taco, and J as-
per Dolphin are members but not really
musicians; their uselessness has become
a running joke. Taco's sister, Syd (the
Kyd) Bennett, is the group's d.j. and re-
cording engineer. And Christopher
(Lonny) Breaux, known as Frank Ocean,
is in many ways an anomaly: both the
newest member (he was inducted last
year) and the oldest (he is twenty-four),
he is also the group's lone singer and the
oruy member with a major record deal-
he signed with DefJam Recordings be-
fore he joined Odd Future.
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"So-what seems to be the problem?"
For the past year, though-since
shortly after the release of the "Earf'
video-Earl Sweatshirt himselfhas been
missing. He hasn't been making public
appearances with the group, and it seems
he hasn't been making private appear-
ances, either. Last summer, a gnomic
message appeared on the group's Tum-
blr page: "Free Earl." In July, when the
group announced its first proper home-
town concert, at the Key Club, in West
Hollywood, the official flyer had Earf s
name crossed out and a terse explanation:
'Will not be there due to mom." Earl was
still absent in October, when the group
played a show in London, at the invita-
tion of the British independent label XL,
and, later that month, in New York,
where teen-age fans and music-industry
executives crowded into a basement and
rapped along. But by then Odd Future
had turned "Free Earf' into a rallying cry,
and it was chanted long and often during
the New York show. Because the mem-
bers declined to say where or what, pre-
cisely, Earl needed to be freed from,
many fans assumed his mother was the
culprit. He was some sort of hip-hop
prodigy-the most exciting rapper to
emerge in years, a virtuoso who was just
starting to figure out what he could do
with words-but he was gone. One day
last December, Tyler sent out a Twitter
message that was at once uninformative
and, in its way, deeply affectionate:
"DAl\1N, EARL AIN'T HERE. LETS SWAG
IT OUT FOR THAT UGLY ASS NIGGA."
I n 2000, Americans bought about
seven hundred and eighty-five million
albums, according to Soundscan, and
about a hundred million of them-13.4
per cent-were classified as "rap." By last
year, total album sales had dropped by
about half, and rap-album sales had
dropped even faster, to twenty-seven
million-about six per cent of the mar-
ket. No form of music has suffered more
from the industry collapse than hip-hop,
a restless, technologically savvy genre
wedded to a stubbornly old-fashioned
business model. Country music has lis-
teners still eager to buy CDs, and indie
rock has bands willing to think of them-
selves as online startups (and supporters
willing to go along); hip-hop is stranded
somewhere in between. Fans gorge
themselves on free online mixtapes,
which are often more vibrant than the al-